


Impossible Things

by russian_blue



Category: Willow (1988)
Genre: F/M, Introspection, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-12
Updated: 2012-12-12
Packaged: 2017-11-20 22:44:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/590480
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/russian_blue/pseuds/russian_blue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Your prompt inspired me to go watch <i>Willow</i> again, and then I came upstairs and accidentally a fic. :-) Happy Yuletide!</p></blockquote>





	Impossible Things

**Author's Note:**

  * For [anr](https://archiveofourown.org/users/anr/gifts).



It wasn’t love that did her in, whatever Madmartigan thinks. It was hope. 

She didn’t recognize it at first, of course. Even now, she isn’t sure that’s the right word for what she felt, standing in that tavern, staring at a man wearing a pink dress and a cocky grin. It felt a lot more like fury, at him for thinking he could make a fool of her. The only hope she felt had to do with the baby: that once it was returned to her mother and disposed of, then . . .

Then what? That wasn’t hope, though if anybody had asked, she would have called it that at the time. _Hope_ implied that things might improve. And did she really think Bavmorda would change, once the child was dead?

Of course not. Things would continue as they always had. Sorsha’s world would be bleak and full of violence, most of it directed at cringing peasants who couldn’t even look her in the eye.

The man in the pink dress had looked. And then he’d escaped—a thing that shouldn’t have been possible, with half a dozen of her soldiers chasing him. That, she thinks, is when that small, nameless spark had turned into hope, though she still didn’t recognize it for what it was.

There had been no reason for hope before then. Not for anything other than Bavmorda’s triumph, anyway. The Nockmaar army had crushed the resistance at Galladoorn; what remained couldn’t possibly stand against them. Kael had handled that, while Sorsha pursued an infant. The general had been smug over the division, but Sorsha knew the truth: hers was the more important task. That’s why Bavmorda had given it to her, the faithful daughter, the only one she trusted.

Sorsha had no reason to betray her. Sorsha had no reason to think betrayal would do any good.

Until a man in a pink dress escaped, taking with him the key to her mother’s downfall. Then, for the first time, Sorsha believed in possibility.

She’s told Madmartigan she loves him for his stubbornness, his devotion to the cause, and it isn’t a lie. But it’s a simplification, because she doesn’t think she can explain the truth.

The truth is that she was entranced by his defiance, long before she loved him. It burned like a flame, refusing to be snuffed out no matter how many times they kicked him to the ground. And she, like a moth, was drawn to it, even though she knew how destructive fire could be.

Then came the tent. Oh, the tent. Madmartigan loves that story—the heroic escape part of it, where he sent the heavy canvas crashing down on the two of them and Sorsha’s soldiers, and then he cut his way through canvas and soldiers alike and went skidding down a mountain on an overturned shield, Nelwyn and baby along for the ride. The part where he was out of his mind on faerie dust usually gets left out. He’s embarrassed by it, she knows, because he can’t spin it into a tale of his own brilliant skill. Willow and the brownies know it wasn’t a cunning diversion; it was Madmartigan risking all of their lives for red hair and and a stubborn chin. They’ll mock him forever if he pretends otherwise.

But she remembers, and so does he, through the haze left behind by the dust. _Without you, I dwell in darkness._ Terrible poetry, and even worse tactics . . . but he can’t blame it all on the faeries, because it didn’t wear off like it should have.

It’s more of an excuse than she has, though. Nobody hit _her_ with the Dust of Broken Hearts. Madmartigan only caught her off guard, waking from a dream in which her mind spun gauzy, incomplete visions of a world in which the forces of Nockmaar might not triumph over all. She’d been dreaming of hope, and then she opened her eyes to the sight of the man who caused it. Reflex had brought the knife up—it wasn’t the first time a man had thought to come after her while she was sleeping, with one purpose or another in mind—but then he started in on the declarations of love, and she just didn’t know what to _do_.

Stab him, obviously. But he hadn’t just thrown her off her stride; he’d made her forget where her feet were. Without her armor, without her soldiers, she’d cut herself temporarily adrift from the reminders that she served Bavmorda. She wasn’t the queen’s daughter; she was Sorsha, dreaming of a different world, and the delusional passion in Madmartigan’s eyes told her that world could be real.

What would it be like, to cast off the shackles of her life and embrace possibility?

It would be terrifying. It _was_ terrifying. When she saw Madmartigan load himself into a catapult and sever the cable, hurling himself straight into a castle wall to save Willow from a troll, she knew exactly what that felt like, because it was the same feeling she had every time she thought about betraying her mother.

But Madmartigan did it.

He flung himself off a bridge onto the head of a monster, arrows raining down around him—not because the future was too bleak to face and he might as well die there as anywhere else, but because he believed he could _win_. One man and one sword against a two-headed monster, but he believed.

And he won.

He escaped from the tavern, he escaped from his cage; he escaped from her army’s camp and the village surrounded by soldiers. None of those should have been possible. Killing that creature shouldn’t have been possible, either, but he did that, too. The sheer _audacity_ of it froze her where she stood in the mud of Tir Asleen, watching this demented man achieve everything he set his hand to, and she _wanted that for herself_.

She wanted to do the impossible.

She wanted to overthrow her mother.

None of this is anything she can explain to Madmartigan. So she tells him other things instead, the kind of flattery he expects (he is, after all, a great swordsman), and the praise he awkwardly shrugs off (his declaration of loyalty to Willow, in the face of Airk’s doubt). All of it is true. And he tells her the same things in return, reasons she can understand, for why he fell in love with the daughter of the enemy—apart from the role played by the Dust of Broken Hearts.

But she wonders, sometimes, whether there are things he can’t say to her, either, because he can’t put them into words. Things that would explain why the dust didn’t entirely wear off.

It should have been impossible, the two of them falling in love. As impossible as defeating Bavmorda.

And so they did it, together.

**Author's Note:**

> Your prompt inspired me to go watch _Willow_ again, and then I came upstairs and accidentally a fic. :-) Happy Yuletide!


End file.
